AND ITS POSTMODERNIST USE IN THE NOVELS OF J.M. COETZEE
1988
by Laraine Christiana O'Connell
Thesis accepted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor Litterarum in the Faculty of Arts (Dept. of English) of the Potchefstroomse Universiteit
vir Christelike Hoer Onderwys.
PROMOTER: A.L. COMBRINK D.LITT. POTCHEFSTROOM
I wish to extend a special word of thanks to
*
Prof. W.J. de V. Prinsloo who encouraged me to undertake this study;*
Prof. A.L. Combrink for her knowledgeable guidance, keen interest and for her enthusiasm which has been a contin-uous source of inspiration;*
the staff of the Ferdinand Postma Library who went to im-mense trouble to procure any material that I required, and posted literally hundreds of books and photocopies to me;*
the Human Sciences Research Council for their financial assistance rendered towards the cost of this research, which is hereby acknowledged;*
SENSAL, for access to reviews and other materials in their possession;*
Hennie, whose loving forebearance and consideration cr eat-ed the stable emotional environment without which it would not have been possible to complete this study.PAGE INTRODUCTION
2 ALLEGORY: A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF ITS DEVELOPMENT UP
TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . . . 7
2 . 1 INTRODUCTION . . . • . . . 7
2 . 2 THE ORIGINS OF ALLEGORY . . . 9
2.3
MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY . . .15
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.
3.1
THE NATURE OF MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY . . .15
2. 3 . 2 BIBLICAL ALLEGORY . . . • • . • . • . . .
19
2. 3 . 3
THE MORALITY PLAY . . .24
2.
3.4
MEDIEVAL LOVE POETRY ...25
RENAISSANCE ALLEGORY EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY ALLEGORY ... . SOME CONTENTIONS SURROUNDING ALLEGORY ... . 2 . 6. 1 ALLEGORY AS GENRE ... .
2.6.2
2.6
.
3
METAPHOR OR METONYMY? SYMBOLS AND SYMBOLI~4 IN ALLEGORY ...27
33
41
41
46
48
2.6.4
ALLEGORY AND ~ITTH ... ...50
2.
6.5
PERSONIFICATION AND AGENTS IN ALLEGORY51
3
MODERN ALLEGORY . . . • . . . • . . .55
3.1
INTRODUCTION . . . • . . . • . . . .55
3.2
THE NATURE OF MODERN ALLEGORY ...58
3.
3
COMPARING EARLIER AND MODERN ALLEGORY ...68
3.4
SYMBOLS AND MODERN ALLEGORY ...•...74
3-5
MYTH AND MODERN ALLEGORY ...76
3 . 6 FABULATION . . . • . . . 77
3.7
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE READER ...•..79
3.8
LITieRATURE ENGAGeE ...•... ...81
3.
9
A WORKING DEFINITION OF MODERN ALLEGORY83
4 SOHE MODERN ALLEGORISTS . . .89
4.1
WILLIAM B. YEATS(1865
-
1939)
.
.
...
.
...
.
.
.
.
89
4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 HERMANN HESSE (1877-1962) DINO BUZZATI (1906-1972) GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) WILLIAM GOLDING (1911-LAWRENCE DURRELL (1912-IRIS MURDOCH (1916-102 104 108 109 115 118
4.10 JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899-1986) ... 124
4.11 GABRIEL OKARA (1921- ) . . . • . . • . . . 128
4.12 JOAO UBALDO RIBEIRO (1941- ... 133
4.13 JOSe DONOSO (1924- ) . . . 135
4.14 CONCLUSION ..•. '... 147
5 ALLEGORICAL TENDENCIES IN SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE . . 149
5.1 INTRODUCTION . . . 149 5.2 JAN LION-CACHET (1838-1912) ... 152 5.3 N.P. VANWYK LOU\11 (1906-1970) ...•... 153 5.4 ETIENNE LEROUX (1922- ) . . . 155 5.5 BARTHO SMIT (1924-1986) . . . 168 5.6 ANDRe P. BRINK (1935-5.7 BERTA SMIT ( 1926-5.8 ELSA JOUBERT (1922-5.9 ANNA M. LOffiv (1913-5.10 SHEILA FUGARD (? 5.11 KAREL SCHOEMAN (1939-5. 12 NADINE GORDIMER ( 1923-5.13 1\liLMA STOCKENSTROM (1933-169 171 172 173 176 177 178 179 5.14 CONCLUSION . . . 180
6 ALLEGORY AS AN ASPECT OF THE NOVELS OF J.M. COETZEE . 181 6 . 1 INTRODUCTION . . . 181
6. 2 DUSKLANDS . . . 184
6. 3 IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY .. . . .. . . .. 209
6. 4 WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS . . . . .. . . 224
6.5 LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K ... 245
8 BIBLIOGRAPHY
299
ADDENDUM I: ABS1RACT i
within this allegurical framework that Coetzee's novels should be read, and within which they attain their most complex meaning. Although many reviewers take cognizance of this fact, no extensive study of this particular aspect has to date been published.
Coetzee's novels qualify as alleguries because of the multi-level nature of the narratives. As Beryl Roberts says, "Endowed with a gift for sparse, spare story-telling, in which there is not a wasted word or image, he yet manages to tell a story of allegoric -al significance, which haunts the mind and touches raw nerves" (1983).
Tony Morphet points out that in Coetzee's very first novel, Dusk-lands, "realism as the faithful history of the interpenetration of man and situation seen from within and without, and judged from a single central point of view" is abandoned (58), and Coetzee strikes out on a course as yet uncommon in South African l itera-ture, but along a trail blazed by writers such as Barth, Pynchon and Borges. In Waiting for the Barbarians Michael Lee identifies a movement in South African fiction "away from direct and realist-ic representation of a deadlocked South African reality •.. through imaginative projection into the realm of allegory, myth and symbol" (1981:88).
Williams refers to the allegorical level of In the heart of the country, in which Magda frees herself from her past, represented by her father, and then tries to relate to the black labourers. "The allegury would suggest that it is too late for peaceful negu-tiations between black and white and the confrontation between them will be violent" (1985:53).
Zamora calls Waiting for the Barbarians Coetzee's most allegorical work, presenting "a portrai·t of the relations between the posses-sor of po>ier and the possessed ,,/hich is both a subtle and a point-ed indictment of those relations" (5).
Life and times of Michael K is identified as an allegory by Allan Huw Smith, who calls Michael K "a bent-wire coat hanger of a char-acter on which to hang this allegory" ( 1983:28), although Zamora feels that this novel is less an allegorical fable of power than Coetzee's other novels. She does, however, connect this novel to the tradition of allegorical dissent which she has traced in much modern literature (11).
Nadine Gordimer (1984:3) is of the opinion that Coetzee chose al-legory as his mode, because it was the only way he could handle the horror he had to convey, and she identifies various allegoric-al symbols in Michael K. Helene Miiller confirms that in Michael K "Coetzee has written an allegory which may be interpreted on two distinct levels: the universal and the more specifically South African" (1985:41). D.J. Enright appears able to justify Life and times of Michael K only on the grounds of its being an allegory, albeit a thin one (1983:1037), while Patricia Blake reads it as an allegory of terminal civil war, and the end of the world (1984:56).
Coetzee's most recent novel, Foe, also falls into this category of allegory. Douglas Reid Skinner remarks that " more allegoric-ally than explicitly, it revealingly examines the complex and highly politicised empirical and textual domains of South Africa, achieving by such inspired distancing an emphatic clarity of vis-ion" (1986b:83). Alexander refers to the fact that the novel is about "the vagaries of communication and above all about the writ-er's craft" (1987:38), while on the surface confronting the read-er with the rudiments of the racist, colonialist situation out of which many of the problems of our present world have grown, thus unmistakably an allegory.
In order to test my hypothesis that the allegorical aspect of Coetzee's novels is of crucial importance to the interpretation of his work, it will be necessary first to trace the development of allegory into modern times. This summary lays no claim to being fully comprehensive, but will hopefully be of sufficient scope to
arrive by this method at a working definition of allegory, within the framework of which it will be possible to evaluate Coetzee's novels as allegories.
2 ALLEOORY: A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF TIS DEVELOPMENT UP TO 1HE NINETEEN'lH CENTURY
2. 1 IN'IRODUCTION
Despite the developments and adaptations that allegory has under-gone through the ages to allow for changing demands and purposes and shifting emphases, it has remained sufficiently recognisable so that even very early definitions are still at least partially valid. Allegory can still be identified as "speaking in other tenns" (Gillie,1972:382), while Whitman (1987:1) points out that from the beginning allegory has been known as an oblique way of writing. A very early theorist, Quintilian, says that allegory presents one thing in words and another in meaning (Levine,1981: 23). These early definitions imply a critical awareness of alle-gory ever since the earliest literary and artistic employment of the form (Bloom,1951:163).
A more modern theorist, Northrop Frye, defines allegory as fol-lows: "We have allegory when the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas, or natural phenomena" (Preminger,1965:12).
Angus
Flet-cher writes that allegory says one thing and means another (1964: 2) while Nuttall defines allegory as "a described set of things in narrative sequence standing for a different set of things in tem-poral or para-temporal sequences; in short, a complex narrative metaphor" (1967:48).These definitions of the simplest form of allegory are useful as starting points, but various authors voice warnings against read-ing adequacy or conclusiveness into them. Levine points out that Quintilian, Fletcher, Frye, Honig and Quilligan have all gone on "from the description of allegory's bipartite design to discussion of its larger significance - raising questions of typology, clas-sical backgrounds, Biblical exegesis, 'levels' of interpretation, iconography, and so on" (1981:23-24). Nevertheless, as Bloom
points out, there has never been any divergence of opinion about the "foliate nature" of allegory (1951:173).
Allegory is then a term denoting a technique of literature, which in turn gives rise to a method of criticism. It is a technique of fiction-writing, for allegory must have some kind of narrative basis (Prerninger:12).
Allegory appears to have come into being as a form of interpreta-tion of the earliest classical myths. It carne to include composi -tional allegory, adjusted itself to accommodate Christianity and continued through the ~tiddle Ages, beconung particularly popular in secular literature as an allegory of courtly love. In more modern times allegory has proved itself to be a flexible literary form, capable of adapting to modern ways (Sattin,1978:4), corning to include satire and irony, and becoming popular as a disguised political and social commentary. Buning points out that in the course of its long history allegory has proved to be an appropri -ate litera~J mode for dramatizing man's psychological experience and search for identity (15). Most recently allegory has served to illustrate man's futile search for meaning in a world that has become a wasteland of frustration and a minefield of racial preju-dice and political dissent.
Angus
Fletcher and others have shown how features of allegory ap-pear in a variety of kinds of works, from its early beginnings, through the parables of Hawthorne, to such modern poets as Yeats and Eliot (Fowler,1982:193).Allegory has remained an important mode employed successfully by various modern authors. Indeed, after a long period of decline, allegory has almost become what it once was: the vogue (Whitman, 1981:64), and its value is proved by the fact that it has survived centuries of use, abuse and criticism. It is indeed 'living alle-gory'.
2. 2 11IE ORIGINS OF ALLEXDU
Whitman has made a study of the meaning of the Greek components of the word 'allegory', and come to the conclusion that the composite connotes both that which is said in secret, and that which is un-worthy of the crowd: guarded language and elite language. These two connotations have become explicit parts of allegorical theory and practice. The secretive language has special importance for political allegory, and elite or superior language has particular point in religious and philosophic contexts (1987:263). "Insofar as the emphasis is placed on saying other than what is meant, al-legorical theory and practice is largely a grammatical or rhetor-ical matter, concentrating on the compositional technique of cre-ating an allegorical text .•• Insofar as the emphasis is placed on meaning other than what is said, allegorical theory and practice is largely a philosophic or exegetical matter, stressing the in-terpretive technique of extracting meaning from a text already written" (Whitman,1987:264).
Auerbach, Lewis and MacQueen are in agreement that allegory origin-ated \~th the ancient Greeks, in a form which we would now call al-legoresis (Lewis,1938:48). Northrop Frye explains that allegore-sis, a system of interpreting the gods as personification either of moral principles or of physical or natural forces, grew up in order to account for the foolish behaviour of the gods. Judaism had similar difficulties and there were Jewish efforts to demon-strate that philosophical and moral truths are concealed in the Old Testament stories (Preminger:13). Bloomfield agrees that his-torically, the allegorical method was developed in Alexandria to interpret 'properly' Homer, and somewhat later there and in Pales-tine to interpret 'properly' the Old Testament, so that it could be seen as the prediction of Christ or the future kingdom of God (1971:301). Quilligan supports this argument, agreeing that it was allegoresis that began with the Greeks, and that many works were felt to be allegorical because they had been made to read so
with having been the first to resort to an allegorical interpreta-tion in explaining such offensive passages in Homer as the battles of the gods. Theagines interpreted below the literal battles of the gods, the description of conflicting elements, or of moral conflicts (Scholes & Kellogg,1966:117).
Buning confirms that the earliest examples of allegory would there-fore be the controversy in early Greek philosophy over the inter-pretation of the stories about the gods in Homer and Hesiod, which led to the various rationalizations and moralizations of classic-al nwLh
(35).
This means that allegory did not develop merely as a device or a fashion, but "was originally forced into existence by a profound and moral revolution occurring in the later days of paganism" (Lewis: 113) • In his fine work on allegory, MacQueen con-firrns that allegory did not originate in the first place as a lit-erary device, and points out that its origins were philosophical and thedlogical (1970:1). Scholes confirms this view, arguing that allegory depends on types, but the types of allegory are re-f err able to a philosophy and theology concerned with ideals and essences (101).Lewis, however, also agrees with Dante that the history of alleg-ory begins with the personifications in classical Latin poetry
( 48 ) . This view is supported by Quilligan who says that "as a narrative in its own right, allegory had to await a Christian Latin poet 111 (1979:19). The type of narrative allegory referred to here, has been termed "compositional allegory" by Whitman ( 1987: 264). \Vhitman says that the interaction between compositional and interpretive strains of allegory reaches a critical stage in the twelfth century, the decisive turning point being the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris. He says that "in this text, the coordi nat-ing tendencies of earlier movements in antiquity and the ~Iiddle Ages begin to coalesce in a comprehensive, far-reaching design"
1. Quilligan identifies this poet as the fourth-century Pruden-tius 0979: 19).
(9-10). Bernard interprets the story of creation by creating al-legorical agents to act out the story, thus integrating the act of interpretation with the act of personification. By consolidating the internal dynamics of allegorical writing, he stimulates the sophisticated allegorical movement of the late Middle Ages (Whit-man, 1987: 10).
Edwin Honig is of the opinion that the origins of allegory are to be located "in the indistinct border between primitive mythologic-al figurations and the more sophisticated structures of philosoph-ical thought" (Buning: 35). This idea is particularly interesting when seen in the context of modern African lite;ature. Hugh Webb contends that this becomes clear when one examines some character-istic features of the African oral tradition, "that vast cultural inheritance responsible for shaping the final form of much of the modern literary achievement [in Africa]" (1978:67). The moralis-ing tales or parables are certainly allegorical in form, "a short narrative presented so as to emphasise the implicit analogy be-tween the component story-parts and the organising moral or les-son" (67).
In agreement with Honig's view, Bloomfield traces the origins of personification allegory into the distant past, pointing out that "it has been argued that the origin of literary personification is to be found in ritual drama, for Canaanite and Egyptian rituals used abstract qualities as divine and semidivine names" (1963:163)• He also concedes that in the earliest Western writings, in the Bible and Homer, personifications are used, and they are found throughout all Greek and Roman literature (163). In fact, Bloom-field declares that if we view the whole range of Western litera-ture, from Homer to the present time, personification allegory will be found to be one of the most popular of all literary modes (1963: 161). He defines personification allegory as the process of anim-ating inanimate objects or abstract ideas (163) and calls it a method of "presenting generalized and idealized notions in litera-ture by literary means" (170).
To Lewis allegory is inventing visibilia to express an immaterial fact, such as the passions which one experiences
(
45),
for he be-lieves that allegory developed as the only way in which to convey that which is subjective in literature, "to paint the inner world" (113). Indeed, he calls it "the subjectivism of an objective age" (30). Allegory makes it possible to convey complexities of mean-ing not otherwise accessible. It causes reverberations in the readers' own experience, so that even the simplest allegory may have almost endless application (Lewis; 1938:289).Levine agrees: "By definition personification is a metaphoric, hence mixed mode - something non-human is endowed with human char -acteristics. This 'endowment' results from the transfer of semant-ic features from a predicate normally associated with humans to a noun (typically functioning as subject) that designates something non-human" (1981:24). He explains that when we say that allegory says one thing and means another, it is the predicate that "says" the one and the personified nouns that "mean" the other (25). Bloomfield acknowledges that the relevant theories of Lewis are perhaps the best-known (1963:168) and he is also in general agree-ment, stating that personification allegory combines the non-meta-phoric subject with metanon-meta-phoric predicate and "yokes together the concrete and the metaphoric in the presentation of generality" (169). He is of the opinion, however, that what Lewis speaks of as "immateriality" is better thought of as "generality" (1963:170).
At the root of the allegorical concept is the traditional notion that it is "an essentially didactic device whose responsibility it is to delight while it teaches" (Bloom: 164) • From the beginning allegory has been associated with narrative, "a narrative, that is to say, or series of narratives, which serves to explain those uni-versal facts that most intimately affect the believer, facts such as times, crops, tribes, cities, nations, birth, marriage, death, moral laws, the sense of inadequacy and failure and the sense of potential, both of \vhich characterize the greater part of mankind" (MacQueen:l).
MacQueen identifies Plato as the effective founder of many aspects of the allegorical tradition. The tradition of Homeric allegores-is was well-established at the time of his birth, and constituted an important element in Greek philosophy by the time he wrote The Republic (Scholes
& Kel
logg:118). In his attempt to give compre-hensible shape to truths that were difficult for the human mind to grasp, he employed myths, allegorical narratives and developed me-taphors (MacQueen:7). MacQueen illustrates the depth of meaning made possible by the use of allegory: "Dis or Pluto, the god of the underworld who rapes Proserpine, is the earth in which the seed is buriect and germinates. At a different level, however, Dis is death, and Proserpine is the human soul, subject to death, but redeemed by the toils of the mother goddess, Ceres" (2). He sug-gests that the Greek philosopher, Sallustius, would have called the one level "material" and the other "psychic". Ceres and Pro-serpine began as an allegorical process of sowing and harvesting corn, which is the material level, but by an almost inevitable ex-tension became an allegory of rebirth after death, which repre-sents the psychic level (1).A second myth which MacQueen discusses is that of the search of the musician, Orpheus, for his dead wife, Eurydice. This allegory he labels psychic: "Orpheus and his music represent the higher intellectual and redemptive powers of the human soul, Eurydice the lower, more appetitive powers which are particularly subject to evil and death. The sufferings of Orpheus in the upper and under-worlds represent the sacrifices necessary if the soul is to r e-deem the lower self which it loves, and without which it cannot find salvation" (4). MacQueen points out that under Orphic infl u-ence, the allegorical journey through the undenvorld became an im-portant part of classical epic poetry, notably in Virgil's Aeneid
(5). "The descent of Aeneas [into Hades] is an allegory of the dark night of the soul as it is tempered to become the instrument of divine purpose" (MacQueen: 5). Wimsatt and Brooks identify the Aeneid as an allegory of the course of human life: "the w ander-ings of the first three books are the tales that amuse childhood;
the love affair of the fourth and the athletic exercises of the fifth typify phases of youth; the descent into Hades of the sixth is a profound study of the whole nature of things; the rest is the contest of active life" (1970:148). Wimsatt calls this a typ-ical moralisation of a classical myth. "One should notice, how-ever, that the two levels of action do not merge when abstract names are assigned. There still exist independently a literal ac-tion and an abstract action which the literal action points to. On the literal level, despite the generalizing names, a specific man still plays a specific lyre in the woods" (1970:25).
Fletcher points out that allegories tend to resolve themselves in-to either of two basic forms, which may be labelled "battle" and "progress". He says that "battle" perhaps begins in Western lite-rature with Hesiod's account of uhe gigantomachia, the battle be-tween titanic creatures for control of the world, but is more pro-minent when psychologised with the Psychomachia (the fight for mansoul) of the early Christian poet, Prudentius. Progress be-gins with the allegorical interpretation of the Odyssey, the Argo-nautica, and the Aeneid (151).
In some allegories, particularly in some of the earliest attempts at allegorical narrative, like Prudentius' Psychomachia, the aes-thetic and mimetic elements seem to be sacrificed to plainness of meaning. In Psychomachia the characters are female soldiers, bearing the names of virtues and vices, involved in unrealistic and aesthetically unsatisfying cavalry charges and single combats, in which the virtues ultimately triumph (Scholes & Kellogg:110). Nevertheless, one of the earliest recorded objections against al-legory is that of Socrates, who complains of the obscurity which shrouds the underlying intention of moralistic poetry (Bloom:l ?J-174).
2. 3 MEDIEVAL ALL~Y
2.3.1 1liE NATURE OF MEDIEVAL ALL~
According to Gay Clifford, the wide range of material included in medieval allegory originated from the encyclopaedic humanism of the twelfth century. She says that the omnipresence of this kind of encyclopaedism that dominated the Middle Ages is suggested by the recurrent figure of'the world as Mirror or Book (1974:64). Leyburn points out that what a mirror reveals is just a refl ec-tion of reality, but it is only by means of the reflection that reality can be perceived (1956:9). It was a development which had an important influence on the intellectual history of the next three centuries, and it affected allegories as much as it did ecclesiastical art and theology. The more comprehensive a work was, the more effective it was thought to be (Clifford:63). She says that "amplification" and "embellishment" were the terms used for excursions into subject matter now regarded as separate from literature (65). Coetser (1985:18) regards this as a weakness, stating that by building three or four levels of meaning into his work, the medieval allegorist made his allegory obscure.
Lewis emphasises that there was nothing mystical or mysterious about medieval allegory. It was a mode of expression used deli -berately ( 1938:48). He
J:Xllnts
rut that we cannot Epeak, can in fact ·hardly think of an "inner conflict" without a metaphor, which is a limited allegory (60). He traces the development of allegory and finds that the habit of applying allegorical interpretations to ancient texts encouraged fresh allegorical constructions (61). Later medieval allegory is a new creation. "It owes to antiquity and to the Dark Ages not so much its procedlire as the preservation of that atmosphere in which allegory was a natural method" (84) • .Whi·tman identifies three different but related versions of the philosophic tradition which distinguish, respectively, three semi-nal allegories in the Middle Ages. He emphasises that none of the
traditions defines the "philosophy" of a particular allegory or any medieval period, but "each approach, brought into the for e-ground by broad changes in medieval intellectual life, illuminates a different allegorical work" (1981:65-66). He calls the first approach the absolute or metaphysical correlation of opposites which divides the very universe into opposites, arguing that one side implies the other. In the Cosmographia Bernard Silvestris seeks to resolve this division. The effort to define the opposi -tions of the natural world might be called the relative, or gene-rative, correlation of opposites, and this preoccupies Alain de Lille's more troubled vision in the De planctu naturae. The rela-tion between nature and the human mind in what might be called the perpetual, or epistemological, correlation of opposites is drama-tised a century after the De planctu in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. Two generations later, Dante consolidates and transforms these three approaches in the Divine Comedy (1981:66).
Bloom says that for the spiritually and morally searching temper of the ~liddle Ages, allegory was ideally suited to the expression of both temporal and everlasting truths, because it offered an ap-parently satisfactory key to many of the mysteries of the moral universe. "Medieval thinkers ... made it impossible for themselves to evaluate every event in nature or in scripture as the reposit-ory of four different yet related kinds of truth, one literal and three symbolic" (165). The three symbolic kinds of truth he ide nt-ifies as allegorical, tropological and anagogical (165). He be-lieves that this rule has survived as the philosophical essence of allegorical writing (166).
Wimsatt finds that modern critics have identified at least three varieties of allegory in medieval literature: topical allegory in which fictional characters and a fictional story represent the real actions of historical people; scriptural allegory written in imitation of the allegory found by medieval exegetes throughout the Bible, and personification allegory in which the actions of persons representing abstract concepts portray events of general
human significance (23). Topical allegory seems to have more historical than literary value. The fable of the mice in Piers Plowman, for example, is generally accepted as a representation of political events in Richard II's time (Wimsatt:23). His king is both the King of England and all kings, his field full of folk both England and the whole human community. The failure of vari-ous orders of Englishmen to fulfil the most basic obligations of social and political ·justice is given grave and apocalyptic sig-nificance (Scholes & Kellogg:144).
McClennan agrees that allegory in its narrower sense is usually moral allegory (1976:39). Zamora is of the opinion that medieval
poets were concerned to preserve the values of a world they felt to be slipping away "under the changing social and intellectual pressures of their times" (1). Allegory personifies abstractions ~uch as love, faith or courage. It may also be historical, pres-enting a historical event or series of events half-concealed by altered names and surroundings. Historical allegory seldom refers to the distant past, and generally has to do with contemporary e-vents. In the Scriptures it often refers to events in the future (McClennan:37).
Zamora (1) gives her description of medieval allegory: "It rests on the understanding of a universe in which all things are funda-mentally signs, an understanding inherent in the ubiquitous trope of the world as God's book. The framework for all medieval signs was believed to be fixed and guaranteed, and diverse spheres be-lieved to be ultimately congruent: the allegorical literature of the medieval period was a means of making this congruence visible".
Allegory may be simple or complex. Simple allegory is often con-sidered to be naive because it subordinates the fiction to the ab-stract "moral". An example is the fable. Simple historical alle-gories occur in some of the later prophecies of the Bible, such as the allegory of the four kingdoms in Daniel. More complex histor-ical allegories tend to develop a strongly ironhistor-ical tone, so that
there is a close connection between historical or political alle-gory and satire (Preminger:12).
Piehler observes that many early medieval allegories are concerned with the logical argumentation between rationality and pre-ratio n-al thoughts and beliefs (1971:7-8). Allegory blurs those distinc -tions that would be distracting. The discursively complex is re -presented symbolically with a directness and unity of expression that suggests an underlying unity, even in the "reality" of the invisible world (Piehler:45). Piehler confirms Lewis's finding that with the turning inward of the mind, to internal debate, comes a tendency towards allegory (34). He suggests that in alle-gory there is a deliberate attempt, supported by both the intuit-ive and rational operations of the mind, to recover the internal dimension that was inherent in primitive myth (10).
Piehler explores a particular type of allegory, a manifestation of a particular kind of experience, visionary allegory. His approach is twofold: a literary historical approach in which he explains medieval allegory in terms of the ancient myths out of which its central imagery developed, and the classical dialogue which formed the basis of its intellectual structure; he also interprets vi-sionary allegory as "a profound and far-reaching exploration of the human psyche, sustained and developed for over a thousand years" (5).
Dreams are an important medieval allegorical device, Piers Plowman containing no less than eight dreams, and two dreams within dreams. Sattin, in fact, contends that allegory did not originate as a literary form at all, but as interpretation of drean5, events or utterances (5). The dreamer is faced by an alanning problem that causes considerable emotional tension. The initial answer to the problem is provided by an enigmatic vision of a psychic authority, and the dreamer has to obtain further guidance from an interpreter. It is this type of allegory that Piehler terms "visionary allegory''. The pattern that is usually followed is the preliminary anguish,
the subsequent prayers and invocations by which the hero obtains access to the visionary world, the landscapes of this world, the characters of the persons he meets there, and the dialogue that ensues between them (Sat tin: 7) • Both Piers Plowman and The Pil-grim's Progress answer to this description.
In medieval visionary allegory the emotional tone of the situation is frequently conveyed by images of landscape and setting (Pieh-ler:41). Coetser points out that the allegorical landscape in medieval visions was drawn from a range of.specific literary sources. The primary source was the Biblical Garden of Eden, and garden imagery of the Song of songs (78).
Piehler has come to the further conclusion, that from the thir-teenth century onwards allegorists increasingly based their alle-gories on the encounter of the narrator with a single specific in-dividual, rather than with a personified abstraction. He suggests that Dante's figure of Beatrice was the great step towards modern conceptions, in which concrete personalities became frequent (142).
2.3.2 BIBLICAL ALLEroRY
The allegorical method of interpretation of the Bible had its ori-gins with Greek and Roman thinkers, who treated classical myths as allegorical interpretations of abstract cosmological, philosophic-al or morphilosophic-al truths (Abrams,l981:88). Piehler agrees that Biblical and Christian allegory developed naturally out of medieval pagan allegory, the already familiar "psychic" level being readily transferred to Christian Biblical exegetical practice, and to re-ligious allegory (80). On the other hand, Scholes and Kellogg warn against this assumption. Although rationalist attacks on the truth and morality of Biblical texts were similar enough to those levelled against Homer, Scholes and Kellogg believe that they can-not be assumed to be a continuing of pre-Socratic Homeric allegor-esis. They motivate their objection by pointing out a basic
dif-ference between the two. Plato and his predecessors understood
the Homeric texts to have been divinely inspired, but the truth
was hidden below the literal surface. The literal surface itself
was a (beautiful) lie. Hebrew exegesis also regards the Bible as
being divinely inspired, but the difference from Greek al
legore-sis lies i~ its acceptance of the scriptural writings as literally
and historically true (Scholes
&
Kellogg:122). St Augustine, forexample, believed that the Bible was literally true. God, being
the author, is the allegorist and He frequently hides his meaning in the historical events recorded by the Old and New Testaments (122).
Bloomfield points out that Prudentius' Psychornactda gave
personi-fication allegory a great boost, representing a break-through in
\vhich Judea-Christian notions were given an epic quality built around personifications (1963:163). He says that when Prudentius "presents artistically" the moral struggle by means of personified abstractions, he is "creating a work which makes clear the norm and the ideal without losing the vividness of the concrete" (169).
Christian visionary allegory contains examples of the two types of
allegorical loci most prevalent in later medieval allegory: the
landscape as setting, and the contrast of landscapes to express
contrasted psychological and spiritual states (Piehler:81). Pi
eh-ler names an example: "The vision of the ninth similitude of the Pastor of Hennas (second century) includes a detailed description and interpretation of the contrasted topography of twelve mount-ains representing twelve contrasted human states" (80).
Corinthians X: 1-11 is an ~xample of allegory. "In this passage
Paul sees the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt as com-bining historical fact with a latent meaning which refers to the Christian Church. Egypt is the old world of sin; the Promised
Land is the Kingdom of God; the wilderness is the struggle for
salvation during this life. The ndraculous crossing of the Red
corresponds to Christian baptism; manna corresponds to the bread of the Eucharist; the water which sprang from the Rock corres-ponds to the wine of the Eucharist; Moses and the Rock corres-pond to Christ, and there may also be a reference to Peter, the Rock on which Christ built His Church ..• " (MacQueen:19-20). Paul saw the old Israel as a type of the New Kingdom. That Paul was right is suggested by the prophetic nature of the later books of the Old Testament (MacQueen:27).
More examples are mentioned by MacQueen, namely the Song of Solo-mon, which may be allegorized in terms of the love between Christ and the Church, and Jonah in the whale's body as the descent into Hell and the resurrection of Christ, the three days spent in the whale's belly being allegorized as the period between Good Friday and Easter Day (20-21).
MacQueen identifies both narrative and figural allegory in the Bible, Corinthians XIII being a figural allegory, and the parable of the Prodigal Son a narrative allegory (18). The Old Testament events, on the other hand, are "types", figures of events in the New Testmaent (18).
The examples mentioned above (the Song of Solomon and Jonah in the whale's body) depend less on a narrative than on a situation (mu-tual love; Jonah' s plight) . "The full meaning becomes apparent in terms only of the future. A figure may be involved, but to bring· out the allegorical meaning it stands, not in isolation, but in meaningful context. The prophetic situation rather than the fig-ure forms the allegory. Narrative is not involved, or if it is, it is at a fairly rudimentary level" (MacQueen:23).
In typological theory, events narrated in the Old Testament are viewed as figures which are historically real themselves, but also prefigure persons, actions and events in the New Testament (Abrams: 87). "Typological interpretation is sometimes said to be hori zon-tal, in that it relates items in two texts separated in time;
al-legorical interpretation is said to be vertical, in that it un-covers multiple meanings expressed by a single textual item"
(Abrams:88). Abrams explains that the distinction is between the historical truth that is expressly signified, and the allegoric meaning that is signified by analogy (88).
Boucher says that typology is the perception of God's acts in his -tory as consistent and steadfast, therefore as interrelated and mutually illuminating. "Typology is continuous not simply because of the continuity of cause and effect in history, but because pur-pose is lent by history 1 s author, God. According to this view God makes each event a partial revelation of His whole purpose and a term relative to the absolute fulfillment" (1981:133).
MacQueen believes that typology dominated Christian thought and Christian art until the Refonnation ( 18 ) and he comes to the con-clusion that typological allegory forms an important subdivision of the more general prophetic and situational fonns of allegory, \vhich are characteristic of both the Old and the New Testament
(23).
The difference between narrative and typological allegory is des -cribed by MacQueen. Typological allegory has no narrative compli-cation such as the role of the Priest and the Levite in the para-ble of the Good Samaritan, or the behaviour of the elder brother in that of the Prodigal Son, these last two being narrative alle-gories. He believes that the majority of the New Testament para-bles are prophetic and situational allegory, not involving typolo-gy ( 23) . Bede makes an important distinction between verbal and factual allegory which MacQueen explains: "Verbal allegory is a trope: it is a .use of figurative language to convey prophetic in-formation. Factual allegory is a New Testament typology" (52).
Clifford contends that all New Testament allegory, particularly situational allegory, originated from a feeling that author and audience were participating in a new and exceptional situation.
She hastens to qualify, however, that this feeling was not con-fined to the New Testament (26). The situational allegorY of the
Bible is, on the whole, more direct and immediate than the
classi-cal allegorY which, while dealing with the day-to-day and
year-to-year routine of life, places this routine at a distance and so
makes it more "comprehensible and controllable" (MacQueen:26).
MacQueen names Mark IV:26-29 (the parable of the man who casts seed into the ground but doesn't know how it grows) as situation-al situation-allegorY, a straight-forward variation on the Seeds and the Ground. The reaping of the harvest, however, now represents the advent of the Kingdom of God (25). Ezekiel XXVII-XXXII is also an example of situational allegory, in which Tyre is presented as a magnificent merchant ship, wrecked at sea (MacQueen:28).
The book of Revelations makes use of situational allegorY, being the record of a series of visions, but structurally can be clas-sified as alphabetic allegorY: "The entire book Revelations re -volves on the phrase which in the first and last chapters John placed in the mouth of Christ: 'I run alpha and omega, the first and the last' [letters of the alphabet]" (MacQueen:33). Alphabet -ical allegorY merges easily into the numerical, and the numbers
referred to in this book, two, seven, twelve, etc., have a
power-ful meaning in relation to time and history (MacQueen:33). This
tradition was continued into later periods and MacQueen refers to a hymn composed by St Colomba of Iona, Altus Prosator, for which he used a similar content, an account of the beginning and end of
the world, in numerical allegorical form (44).
Scholes and Kellogg are of the opinion that the "plot" of the
Bible may be seen not merely as a horizontal line stretching from
the beginning to the end of historical time, but also as a second line, just above the former, gradually rising and leading in time from man's expulsion from paradise to his reunion with God in Heaven ( 124).
2.3.3
mE KJRALITY PLAYThe oldest kind of compositional allegory is the moral or homil
e-tic allegory. In the Middle Ages the moralities were the most
im-portant form of allegorical drama. Riggio suggests that l'Jedieval
Christian writers favoured allegory "because of its tendency to
give universal sanction to a particular set of moral patterns and to transfer meaning consistently from one level of meaning to an-other, features which accorded well with medieval theological i -deals" ( 1981: 188).
Mackenzie states that the Moralities are not a series of plays \~ich have adopted allegory as a method of presentation; but a
series of allegories presented in dramatic form (1914:vii) in
which the emphasis is placed "on those allegorical figments that expressed the fate of man on earth" (Pre.minger: 531). It is
didac-tic and employs three kinds of allegorical agents: the individual,
the type, and the allegorical hero (Coetser:27). It has two poles, its bipolarity (birth, death, etc.) emphasising facets of life, which become allegorical leit-motifs (Coetser:25). Coetser quotes
Mackenzie as saying that the main object of a morality play is the
teaching of some moral lesson, in which the principal characters are personified abstractions of universal types (25). The motif is the pilgrinillge of the life of man, an enterprise ending in death or a battle between the forces of evil. The crisis in the
full-scope moralities is the unexpected arrival of Deatl1
(Premin-ger:531). Abrams calls them dramatised allegories of the life of man, his temptation and sinning, his quest for salvat ion, and his confrontation by death. The hero represents Everyman, and among the other characters are personificat ions of virtues, vices and Death, as well as angels and demons who contest the possession of the soul of man (108).
Broussard is of the opinion that the theme of a journey which ori -ginated two civilizations before in the Odyssey, became the medi -eval morality play epitomized in Everyman (1962:6).
Riggio recognises change or development in English morality plays, pointing out that those of the fifteenth century characteristical-ly dramatise the process of Christian redemption as an allegory of temptation, repentance, and divine mercy, while sixteenth-century moralities often serve more obviously political purposes (187). Riggio says that Bevington identifies Wisdom who is Christ (c. 1460-1480) as the first English morality play to contain an exten-ded political commentary, but finds evidence to suggest that as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century, in the oldest ex-tant English morality play, The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1400-1425), there is a consistent political sub-structure associating economic and social abuse with feudal patronage (188). The Castle of Perseverance dramatises four theological allegories: the pil-grimage of human life, the battle between the vices and the reme-dial virtues, the defence of a figurative castle, and the debate of the four daughters of God in the parliament of Heaven (Riggio: 188). She emphasises, however, that the play goes beyond tradi-tional theology in its use of allegory, and becomes a reflection on the social order (189).
2.3.4 MEDIEVAL LOVE POE'IRY
Medieval love poetry is apt to repel the modern reader, both by its form and its matter. Lewis is of the opinion, however, that we should understand our present, and perhaps even our future bet-ter if we could succeed in reconstructing the long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of ex-pression (1), because humanity moves through stages of development yet never leaves anything behind.
The allegorical method in general was familiar to thirteenth-cen-tury readers (Lewis:116). In support of his view of the import-ance of allegory, Lewis says that "the inner life, and specially the life of love, religion and spiritual adventure, has ... always been the field of true allegory; for there are intangibles which
only allegory can fix and reticences which only allegory can over-com~"(166).
According to Bloomfield, as far as the West is concerned, "the great efflorescence of personification began in the late twelfth century with the extensive use of animated concepts and notions, many of them psychological, in romance, lyric, and debate" (1963: 163).
The first part of Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris is
perhaps the finest example of allegory in medieval love poetry.
Lewis describes its second part by Jean de Meun as a failure, but
a great failure, designating the Romance as the typical poem of
the Middle Ages (155). The poems that derive from it constitute
the rnost important literary phenomenon of the later Middle Ages
(156).
In the fourteenth century the sentiment of courtly love, expressed
in the form of an allegory, made its effective appearance in
Eng-land (Lewis:158). Chaucer's love poems are all recognisable des
-cendants of 111e Romance of the Rose, but none of them is a poem of the same type ( 166) . Lewis believes, however, that while the
Guil-laume Le Roman de la Rose is a true allegory of love, only a
trace-work of allegory survives in the work of Chaucer. We have dreams,
allegorical persons, and. in the Book of the Duchesse we have the
allegorical frame of a dream and courtly love, but Lewis contends
that allegory has disappeared (167). Love allegory, however, forms
the framework of Gower's Confessio (Lewis:213).
Lewis finds allegory to be the dominant form in the years bet•"een
Chaucer's death and the emergence of the poetry of Wyatt,
empha-sising that dominance 1s not necessarily good for a form (232).
Bloomfield contends that the period from 1200 to 1700 was the
great era of personification allegory in European literature (1963:
163). It is the labouring of this form that has given allegory
Ages progress. With Deguileville medieval allegory descends to such depths that Lewis almost finds it possible to excuse the last century of criticism "for rejecting allegory root and branch as a mere disease of literature", but even in Deguileville's work there are passages that restore one's faith (Lewis:269). Through Lyd-gate and Hawes there is improvement but a new perfection is only reached in Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Lewis:279). It was his method to have an allegorical core in each book, although not e-verything in the poem was allegorical (Lewis:334).
2. 4 RENAISSANCE ALLEGORY
"With the ascendancy of the Renaissance the practical concept of allegory became comparatively simplified, although in its general outlines the mode supported the same tropological and anagogical overtones as in medieval usage" (Bloom: 166). Bloom points out that the Renaissance practitioners and critics retained the con -cept of the literal-figurative level, but synthesized the three symbolic levels into one (166). Allegory remained a valuable di-dactic tool (167).
McClennan expresses some generalizations concerning the function of allegory during the Renaissance: that it was useful as a rhet-orical device, and that it was useful to half conceal contemporary references (37). Zamora sees similarities in medieval and Renais-sance allegories in that they both present an admirable surface of action and description which corresponds to a moral and ethical system- unstated perhaps, but palpably present (1).
McClennan has made a study of the definitions of the term 'alleg-ory' as it was used between 1550 and 1650, and has found it used loosely enough to include fable, prophecy, irony, hyperbole, and similar devices. "It is synonymous with the vague, the strange, even the technical" (37). Puttenham's definition is more limited, finding allegory to be "continued metaphor" (McClennan:37).
Put-tenham and some critics, in fact, decry allegory because of its "duplicity" (Bloom:168), while other critics like Harington and practitioners like Spenser acknowledge allegory not as a deception for the sake of concealment, but as a "transparently adorned state-ment of both tropological and anagogical truth" (Bloom: 168). This latter view is predominant during the Renaissance period.
In his letter to Cangrande, Dante expounds the four possible sen-ses which he identifies in polysemous allegory: the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical. He uses the Biblical account of the departure of the Israelites out of Egypt to illus-trate his theory. "Here the literal sense is the actual, his -torical journey out of Egypt; the moral sense is the conversion of the soul from the misery of sin to a state of grace; the ana-gogical sense is the passage of the soul from terrestial c orrup-tion to heavenly glory" (Nuttall:23). Nuttall remarks that Dante allies his Comedy with scriptural allegory (23).
Leyburn focuses attention on the fact that Renaissance \vriters were still convinced that allegory is "a decoration of unpalatable truth, the sugar coating of the pill" ( 3) . Although Scholes and Kellogg find it difficult to imagine that the representational or aesthetic qualities of allegory could ever have been received in this way (110), this conviction probably stermned from the use made of allegory by the medieval church. In the interpretation of scripture Leyburn recognises that the presence of allegory is i n-dicated in three of the four senses, literal, allegoric, tropol o-gic and anagogic (3).
Up to the Renaissance, visionary allegory is defined by i·ts use of the images of the external world, and the structural principles of the classical dialogue, to fashion a visionary world "in which spiritual powers can be encountered and portrayed directly" (Pieh-ler:10). Spenser's allegory, however, finds its most characteri s-tic images not in the world of experience, but in the Faeryland of myth and romance (Scholes & Kellogg: 145). The introductions to
each of Piers Plowman, Faerie Queene and Pilgrim's Progress, con-front the reader with a strange world, each distinctive, though at the same time a combination of elusiveness and familiarity. They are neutral and indefinite, and yet immediately suggest that they mean something important (Clifford:2). Rosamund Tuve distinguish-es between "moral" allegory, which by universalizing human behav-iour teaches us hov; to act, and "allegory proper" which is con-cerned with man as a soul to be saved. Both kinds of allegory are present in Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Tuve,1966:2S). Spenser's doctrine is based on a broadly humanistic Christian ethic and theology, but his heroes, which being illustrative of specific ~ tues, are also types of men, not purely intellectual symbols.
Lewis calls Spenser the great mediator between the Middle Ages and the modern poets: "What the romantics learned from him was some-thing different from allegory; but perhaps he could not have taught it unless he had been an allegorist. In the history of sen-timent he is the greatest of the founders of that romantic concep-tion of marriage which is the basis of all our love literature · from Shakespeare to Meredith" (360) .
Scholes and Kellogg identify Spenser and Dante as being among the few narrative poets really to master allegorical composition. It is possible to gain from their work an idea of the essence of al-legory, and what qualities are indispensible to allegorists: "They have in common extraordinary literary learning and linguistic abi-lity; ease and control in writing vernacular verse, based on en-ormous natural gifts and an arduous apprenticeship in versifica-tion; a deep commitment to ideas, balanced by an esthetic commit-ment to the art of narrative" (108).
During the Renaissance the fundamental narrative forms of allegory are still the journey, the battle or conflict, the quest or search, and transformation, some form of controlled or directed process. Both the allegorical journey and the allegorical battle descend from myths originating in classical texts. Clifford says that the
control is provided by the object of the activity: "We interpret the significance of the 'motion' of the characters and of the for-ces affecting them in the light of knowledge about the direction in which they travel 11 ( 15) • This is possible because the dir ec-tion of the action is usually signalled at the outset: "The dreamer hero of Piers Plowman asks, 'How may I save my soul? How
may I know the true from the false?' and these questions initiate
the movement of the poem. Christian asks, 'Whither must I fly?' Spenser's knightly heroes are assigned to particular tasks" (15). Clifford enumerates the diversity of objectives of allegorical heroes: "Salvation in Piers Plowman; true courtesy in Book VI of The Faerie Queene; sexual possession and pleasure in Le Roman de laRose" (12).
She points out that all these allegories are concerned as much with the way in which the characters go about achieving these ob
-jects as with the actual achievement, the conclusion of the
narra-tive (12). Lewis calls these fundamental narrative forms arche-typal patterns which often appear in works as motifs ( Coetser:20-21). Honig designates this allegorical quality "a twice-told tale", expressing a vital belief (1959:12). He calls the tale "twice-told" because it employs an old story, the allegorical motif, as the pattern for a new story. According to Rosamllild Tuve it does not matter where the parallels are fetched from in allegory: 111\That
counts is whether a metaphorically understood relation is used to
take off into areas where a similitude can point to valuable human
actl.on, or to matters of spiri·tual import" ( 13 ) .
Coetser agrees with the idea of a basic structure, pattern or pre-text forming the basis of allegory. As an example he cites Don Quixote. He is of the opinion that the chivalric romances, of which Don Quixote was intended to be a satire, fonn its pre-text
(36)
.
"Allegory requires not only an episodic narrative which can be e x-tended at will, but also means for the analysis of that narrative.
Exposition must co-exist with the dramatized substance of the ex-position" (Clifford: 23). Clifford finds that the form which i dEal-ly meets this requirement is the journey, "a metaphor for life which can be found at almost all periods of Westem culture" ( 23) . She says, furthermore, that "in journey, as in dream-vision, the traveller is an instrument whereby systems can be explored.
Be-cause he is an outsider he often possesses a special kind of ob-jectivity about the newly encountered system as a whole while the sequential nature of his experiences provides for explaining its. particularities" (23). The allegorical joumey also takes the form of a quest, and need not be a physical journey, but a journey of the spirit. DonQuixote,
for example, becomes a symbolic fi -gure of a man and his quest for spiritual freedom (Coetser:39). Fletcher says that the traveller is a natural hero for allegory, because on his journey he is plausibly led into fresh situations, and new aspects of himself may be turned up (3).MacNeice is of the opinion that the medieval morality play, Every-man, is an obvious prototype for Bunyan, "for Christian is Every-man again, and his quest can stand for any quest that begins in anguish and ends in self-conquest and death" (1965:29).
Zamora has her own views ahout the occurrence of the quest motif in allegory: "Though it is conrnon enough in European medieval and renaissance allegories, the form itself was not presented as a quest so much as an assertion, or rather,. a re-assertion of the in-stitutional imperatives of church and crown" (1). Fletcher iden-tifies a further guise under which the quest motif appears, being presented as "an eternally unsatisfied search for perfection, a sort of Platonic quest for the truly worthy loved object" (64). The imperfection of mortal love and life is illustrated by the fact that the typical knight in The Faerie Queene is rewarded for victory not with bliss, but with a further challenge (Fletcher:6S).
Nuttall observes that the great critical error in dealing with the personifications in an allegory like Bunyan's, is "to suppose that
because the degree and elaboration of personification, etc., is so obviously fictional, the personification itself must be fictional also" (32). He explains that Bunyan probably believed that some -thing bearing a recognisable resemblance to Apollyon did exist, just as he fully expected there to be a Heavenly City which he could not accurately describe because he had never been there. It is therefore not mere fiction, just as Apollyon is not mere fiction. "Bunyan uses his figures and personifications not because he be-lieves in them tout
court,
be because he does not know how else to say what he wants to say" (32).Frye remarks that often the allegorist is too interested in his ad-ditional meaning to care whether his fiction is consistent or not as a fiction. Bunyan,. and even Spenser occasionally drop into na-Ive allegory (Preminger:12) and this is possibly one of the rea-sons why allegory has met with criticism from the earliest times and is still frequently the object of derogatory comrr,ent.
According to Piehler, the importance of allegory as a serious~
waned in the fifteenth century "owing to the grm•ing inability of
allegorical poets to continue to achieve imaginative comprehension
of the symbolical and mythical elements of the form" ( 20). A more strictly analytic appt•oach to the phenomenal world had developed by the seventeenth century and made allegory seem trivial (20).
McClennan points out, however, that the usefulness of allegory as
a rhetorical device is never challenged, and that it is a highly effective mode. He holds that this is as true at the end as at the beginning of the period (37). The use of allegory to care ful-ly veil contemporary references was firmly established in this p e-riod.
The image of the world as book survives into the seventeenth cen -tury, but after that becomes less common \Clifford:54). Clifford points out that Galileo spoke of the book of the universe being open, but illegible to most men, because they did not understand its language ( 6 5) . This connnent marked a great change, in fact a
complete contrast to the medieval encyclopaedic approach. It was "the beginning of the fragmentation of the intellectual world and the dividing up of the imaginative universalism available to Alain de Lille, Dante, Langland or Spenser. The fragmentation is sug -gested by the way in which attitudes to digression change" (Clif-ford:65).
2.
5
EIGH'EEN'IH AND NINETEEN'IH-CENTURY ALLEOORYFrom the late seventeenth century onwards, allegory underwent a drastic change. Even from a casual reading it is clear that far from offering "an ordered universe as an object of delighted con -templation", works are written with a sense of hostility towards
any systematization of life. Clifford says that they are still
frequently concerned with order, but as something threatening (110). She suggests that the capacity for constructing and believing in a coherent world view began to disintegrate in the eighteenth centu-ry as can be seen in Swift' s A tale of a tub ( 1 704) , which is "a
deliberate parody of the allegorical method, a brilliant
palimp-sest of irony", and in Gu1liver's travels (1726) which ironically
mocks and parodies cultural authority as well as its own textual
authority (49). Leyburn points out that in A tale of a tub, the story is the determining force, but instead of finding a vehicle for his wit in the Bible and playing upon the familiarity of the borrowed story as Dryden has done, Swift chooses to make a narra-tive from his own "invention" (22).
Clifford advances three plausible reasons for this radical change in attitude: the growth of a materiaListic, mercantile ethic in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the subje
ct-ivism of the Romantics, and the rise of Freudian and post-Freudian psychology in the twentieth century (117). Piehler explains the change which has taken place by pointing out that by the seven~ century an increasingly analytical approach to the phenomenal w:rld made allegory seem trivial. He says that "the attenuated allegory
of the eighteenth century, appealing to the reader on the al lego-rical level alone, bereft of serious psycho-therapeutic purpose and of support from dialogue or symbolism, is responsible for the low opinion of allegory as a genre at the present time, as well as the lack of understanding of the complex and profound char ac-ter of medieval visionary allegory" (20). Buning goes so far as to declare that the end of allegory in the Augustan period (early and mid-eighteenth century) was heralded by Swift and Pope. Their satires mocked the older forms of allegory and allegoresis, and replaced commentary by parody (39).
Allegory and satire are the two extremest forms of didactic narra-tive. In general allegory tends to result from the exertion of intellectual control over aesthetic forms like romance and folk-tale. Satire, on the other hand, tends to result from intellect-ual control over such empirical forms as history, travel narrative and novella. Allegories and satire are mixed forms (Scholes
